Arotrios
Arotrios avatar

Arotrios

@Arotrios@kbin.social

For Amusement Purposes Only.

Changeling poet, musician and writer, born on the 13th floor. Left of counter-clockwise and right of the white rabbit, all twilight and sunrises, forever the inside outsider.

Seeks out and follows creative and brilliant minds. And crows. Occasional shadow librarian.

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Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

WOOOT! Another rogue thread!

If you ran Rogue until the early morning hours, or learned that the secret to beating Hack was to get drunk on a potion of confusion and read a scroll of teleportation, then I present to you the penultimate rogue-like game, still maintained and free to download - Angband - everything Rogue and Hack aspired to be.

Product Disclaimer: Several of my college friends failed classes due to this game. Do not download during finals.

ChanceHMiller, to random
@ChanceHMiller@mastodon.social avatar

It’s one thing to be skeptical about a new social network, especially from Meta. But the visceral reaction that some people on Mastodon are having to Threads is just bizarre. It’s not constructive criticism, it’s just hate.

Sometimes it feels like there’s a certain crowd of people on Mastodon that just …hates fun? I don’t get it. No one is taking Mastodon away from you.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

I don't hate fun. I don't hate expansion of the Fediverse.

I do hate Meta, and with very good cause - anyone who's been in the industry for awhile is well aware of their philosophy when it comes to users (cattle). I do not use their services and I do not trust them with my data.

On a larger level, Meta's strategy in the Fediverse, given their corporate philosophy and previous actions, reeks of the "embrace, extend and extinguish" model developed by Microsoft in the mid-90s, and the size of their user base immediately makes them one of the biggest organizations in the Fediverse - Meta's influence will be significant when it comes to evolving the ActivityPub protocol.

Finally, Threads is just an inferior product to what's already available in the Fediverse. My personal favorite - go and check out Kbin for a bit. Even without the Meta audience, the Fediverse already has better alternatives available that don't cost you your privacy.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Well, once Threads federates, everyone you know on Threads will also be on Mastodon (and Kbin) unless your instance has defederated from Threads.

Rather than following your friends to an organization you know is going to treat you poorly, you could lead them to a better alternative, but I understand your personal desire to have a large audience and to maintain your current connections. That being said, the issues with Threads are very valid, especially for those of us with our social networks already in the Fediverse.

Anyone hosting Lemmy and Mastodon on the same server?

I have Mastodon running on a VPS running Debian 11. Now I would like to add a Lemmy instance on the same server. I tried using the from scratch method from Lemmy documentation, but ran into errors that likely stemmed from minor version incompatibilities of the dependencies. I tried using the Lemmy easy deploy script but it wants...

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Kinda tangential, but have you tried Kbin? Handles both Mastodon and Lemmy really well from a user standpoint.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

This is kind of a garbage article. The link to the actual interview provided by Yahoo only gives a brief summary focused on the attempted assassination of Budanov and one vague byline about how he believes Russia is ready for civil war.

Further detail shows that these assumptions are couched in the context of 4-5 years, which isn't really "on the edge" - so I'm rating this link clickbait.

That being said, as other commenters have mentioned, this is pretty obvious to everyone that the Russian Federation is headed towards a major economic collapse, which will be the best driver of political change. If sanctions continue to impact their economy for that long, they'll reach a critical mass point where they won't be able to support their war machine, which will fragment into regional power bases, similar to what we've seen with Wagner. This could happen quickly with Putin's absence, or it could be drawn out depending on how much longer Putin lives and what lengths he goes to to maintain control. It's very clear that without his presence or a similar dictatorial figure, Russia will collapse into infighting as its economy implodes. The only figure I can think of, that has that kind of clout in Russia after Wagner's disgrace is Kadyrov, but his power base is entirely regional, Moscow would never accept him due to Russian racism and cultural biases, and he just doesn't have the intellectual capacity or political savvy that Putin does.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

This is why I decided to go into analysis rather than management. Coffee, weed and cigarettes are a considerably more pleasant combination of addiction, and instead of drunkenly raging at my subordinates, I just giggle when things get stressful. That or take a nap.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Thanks for the mention @brainfreeze! I just wanted to add that having explored lemmy and mastodon, I really prefer kbin as a user. I've got access to both read and post in a searchable manner, and it nicely separates the twitter style content from Mastodon into the Microblog section. There's also already a number of 3rd party greasemonkey scripts that enable things like collapsible comments and a floating subscription bar, link courtesy of @Boabab.

OC Would you vote for a politician that used online voting software to determine the stance they should take on every issue? Would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

I've been thinking a great deal on systems that would help enable direct democracy, something I feel is vital in our increasingly centralized and polarized political world. In my eyes, votes are the eyes of the country - they are the best way for a governmental system to understand the needs of its populace....

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

I hear you, and these are good points. I was looking to strike a middle ground where the leadership of the politician could still be in play, but they'd be provided with dynamic voter input that would guide their decisions in a more democratic manner. Right now, particularly in the US, politicians only pay attention to their voters at election time, and only to those who help them win, and they can only win with the money that those who want influence over the politician donate. However, if instead of relying on campaign funds, they had a tool to keep in synch with their voters more effectively, it could blunt the power of wealthy individuals to corrupt the democratic process.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Thanks for your thoughts.

As someone who has worked with large databases and ecommerce for the last 20 years, the tech is definitely there - in fact, it's lightyears beyond there when you get machine learning and AI into the mix. What's not there is the financial and political will to fund development and open up the governmental databases you'd need to make the system work. The way I'd do it would be to assign each voter on the roles an account based on their voter registration, and have a photo ID verification step (which is something a large number of online marijuana dispensaries have had in use for a while now) with 2FA to the phone number on record. This is just about as secure as a mail-in ballot.

The device level security is good point, but not an insurmountable one - there are plenty of financial apps that operate as walled garden doors to their secure systems.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Yo dawg I heard you liked bitchin about people bitching about reddit in your bitchin about reddit...

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

It's starting to look like the capacity for a user to independently defederate their content from specific platforms is in order. Even better would be the capacity to select what specific content is federated where when publishing.

I personally want nothing to do with Meta, but I'd prefer to have the choice rather than having it made for me by the admins.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Well, yeah, that's how it works now.

I'm looking at an improvement to the current system. Admin views can change, and in this scenario they're a form of centralized power and responsibility. Delegating this particular power and responsibility to the user would remove the additional burden of moderation and allow the admins to focus on running the instance rather than policing the Fediverse.

Giving users the choice of where their content is federated seems like a happy medium for all parties concerned. The admins don't have to get political and the users can stay away from the Zuckening if they want to.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

It's not a larger server load, because you're actually publishing less as users defederate their content. The SQL is actually pretty simple if you have a content field for blacklisting that the user selects when publishing. On the federating front end, you simply don't publish the content to the instance the user defederated from, as marked in the content field. It's basically one more line in SQL - essentially would be something like:

where content.blacklist != domain

in the select statement.

This is actually already in play to some extent over here at kbin, where @Ernest has made one helluva incredible engine - we've got domain level filtering for our feeds, and the search capacity is getting pretty cool. Having that same capacity for what we publish would make for an amazing platform.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

As someone who works with large data on a daily basis, no, it's not.

Gonna point you to my post here.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

No, this is talking about what you publish as a user, and choosing where it appears.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

It's not a big change - it's adding a field, a table, and a filtering line to the outgoing SQL select statement that chooses what a domain accesses when it requests the feed. Access level control has been a thing for content management systems for 20 years - this is not a big ask.

But to be honest, as you're the third person to have this misconception, I'm getting to the point where I'm almost tempted to crack open the kbin code and see if I can do it myself.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

I'm going to have to dig into it more, as filtering content from an API feed based on the referring domain's api credentials is something that's commonplace in the private sector and on other open source projects - in fact, I've recently built some reports in Quicksight that do exactly that, and output results on a secure row level basis.

I think it appears more daunting than it is (context I've been a web dev, analyst, ecom manager for 20+ years), but I haven't yet had time to dig into the code. As you're now the fourth person to make this claim, I'm now inspired to actually go and dig into this and see if I can hack it on my own. If I manage to do it (or it results in total failure), I'll update my opinions and these posts accordingly. Disclaimer - I am lazy and slow, so this may take a bit.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Am I the only one who finds those numbers abnormally high? The sourcing also seems suspect - going through the verge posts, they're just quoting internal numbers with no sourcing.

Here's my question - it says activated profiles, not 30 million signups. If a large chunk of those are Insta and FB users, it seems more than likely that a lot of those profiles could be activated internally (I work with databases, this could be as easy as changing a 0 to 1 in a field in the profile table if they've got it integrated right). I'm also curious as to the content of the 95 million posts - how many of those are an automated "Hi I'm on threads!" message when the profile starts up?

That being said, I'm not curious nor stupid enough to actually signup and let them Zuck my data, but this smacks of astroturfing.

nixCraft, to random
@nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

What's your favorite database?

Wrong answers only.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

The one on the lower left.

Free_Press, to Ukraine
@Free_Press@mstdn.social avatar

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

Prigozhin must watch a lot of old "Pink Panther" movies because he uses disguises as well as Inspector Cluseau.

Found in the search of Prigozhin's vila!
️

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

What I hear when I think of the Pink Prigohzin

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Write your warning here

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Never eat kangaroo in Paris, and don't go to Crater Lake at night.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

These are awesome - thank you!

upmultimedia, (edited ) to random
@upmultimedia@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I wish I knew the full business story behind Defiance (a series from 2013). A co-production between SyFy (Defiance the show) and gaming company Trion Worlds (Defiance the MMO).

It's such an unusual collaboration (maybe Comcast?). It must've been successful because the (not cheap) show went for 3 seasons and the game lasted for 8 years.

Yet both have kind of vanished -- no sequels, no spin offs, no EU

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

The game was pretty good, but it took place in San Francisco rather than St. Louis. This meant there wasn't a lot of tie-in to the series, although you did run into the main character dude a bit. It was fun to explore - they did a great job on matching much of the real-world terrain - but it was clear from the onset that the challenge of trying to keep the game in synch with the series was more of an effort than they had anticipated. I think the main issue was that the show only really appealed to a subset of sci-fans, and only a subset of those were gamers, and an even smaller subset of that were into the FPS / MMO combo that the game provided.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

A product's name should reflect what it does, not what you were smoking when you came up with the idea.

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